Prior art approaches for managing software servers in such a multi-system network often involve centralized software distribution and data collection systems. As one example, the Tivoli software distribution system available from IBM is a product that, in the context of multisite management of communications systems, is a complicated architecture where a centralized distribution and collection system server, network infrastructure and gateway elements are required to interrelate the various components. The pathway between all of the devices is reliant upon a central distribution system server, shared switches/routers, etc., and accordingly there are single points of failure for the entire distribution system. In addition, prior art software distributions solutions require additional network and computer infrastructure, gateways and servers when additional nodes are added to the network. This requirement for increased infrastructure increase complexity, cost and has a significant impact on scalability of the network to be managed. In addition, prior art software distribution solutions are not instrumented to provide specific and real time fault management functions and remote administration functions for the variety of capabilities that exist on a converged voice and data platform. Furthermore, for an individual converged communications system to access a software update (e.g., a cab file), it must use the same shared bandwidth, infrastructure and centralized software services as all the other converged systems. Besides the undue expense of such a proprietary system (perhaps most especially for smaller installations), there is the associated complexity for configuring and maintaining such an approach. Because the same centralized distribution system is being used for multiple systems (e.g., plurality of converged communications systems 2), the management of the overall system is expensive and complicated and requires additional servers, boundary gateways and network infrastructure to scale and support additional converged solutions. It is not particularly efficient for the presently discussed converged architecture, where, for example, there are complex management issues of a distributed communications services platform. In addition most of the software distribution solutions are focused on distribution or pushing content from a central location to a number of servers and thus not well tuned for fault management, the collection of data, reports and server back-ups. As a final limitation, in a typical software distribution environment, the control mechanisms and data transport are tied together and vendor specific, not able to support alternative vendor transport methods and external server storage and hosting facilities. In order to get one feature of the system, the consumer must take the whole package, and consequently may not leverage pre-existing components that may not be part of the same proprietary system.